St. Augustine's Conversion to Christianity Essay

In Book III of Confessions, his range of “rotten…ulcerous” sins expands from teenage pranks to attending public spectacles and reading tragedies. Augustine suspects that seeking truth might be more important than worldly success. In Book III he also stumbles upon the Manichees faith, which is a heretical version of Christianity. In this section much of this book is dedicated to attacking the Manichee faith. Augustine’s first criticism of the Manichee doctrines he believed concerned their dependence on an elaborate mythology. The sun and the moon were seenas divine beings and they tended to picture divinity in terms of “physical images” or “bodily shapes”. These images plagued Augustines mind almost until his conversion, which kept him from recognizing God as a “spiritual substance” rather than some sort of enormous physical mass. Augustine has 3 main criticisms for the Manichee belief. The first being that it challenged the concerns of nature and the source of evil. Second, it challenged the nature of God as a being and the idea of God as omnipotent and omnipresent. And thirdly, the rejection of the book of Genesis and much of the Old Testament.. Augustine concludes with a story of how

This want of something more concrete but metaphysical leads straight into the fifth chapter, “Manichaeism.”  This details the future bishop’s obsession with the mysteries and dualism of the Manichean teaching, as well as Augustine’s work at spreading the Manichee philosophy, as well as his love for what it made him, rather that what it actually taught.  “Friends,” the sixth chapter, details his life with his unnamed concubine among his celibate Manichee comrades.  Next, the seventh chapter, titled “Success,” outlines Augustine’s first taste of fame as a writer and as a public speaker.  Thus, Brown ends part I.

Augustine was born at Thagaste, a small town in the Roman province of Numidia in North Africa. His mother was a devout Christian, but his father never embraced the Christian faith. He received a classical education that both schooled him in Latin literature and enabled him to escape from his provincial upbringing. Trained at Carthage in rhetoric, which was a requisite for a legal or political career in the Roman empire, he became a teacher of rhetoric in Carthage, in Rome, and finally in Milan, a seat of imperial government at the time. At Milan, in 386, Augustine underwent religious conversion. He retired from his public position, received baptism from Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, and soon returned to North Africa. In 391, he was ordained to the priesthood in Hippo Regius and five years later he became bishop.

Augustine's writings became sacred in their own way. His books still form the backbone of Catholic philosophy today. He died during the barbarian invasions around the year 430.

In the Confessions, Augustine writes that the Manichean religion has a duelist view of good and evil. He explains that the Manichees believe there to be two metaphysical forces, God and Satan. Subsequently, there are two kingdoms: the Kingdom of Light, created by the former, and the Kingdom of Darkness created by the latter.3 The Kingdom of Light, he says, is associated with spirit, and the Kingdom of Darkness with matter. The body, thus, is deemed to be evil in Manichean thought because it is matter fighting against the soul, which was understood to be a piece of the divine, broken off from the rest of God. The divine, as a result, is imprisoned in the material world.4 Augustine further comments that the Manichees find that humans beings are not responsible for their own actions since it is darkness, or a desperate evil will in them, rather than their own will that causes them to do evil.5 Because of all this, they believe that good and evil, spirit and matter, are two opposite, independent, and equal forces in constant conflict with each other. They believe evil is as powerful as

We begin Augustine’s attraction to Manichaeism with his travels to Carthage. His initial reaction to Carthage was shock, due to the citizen’s audacious affinity towards things which distracted them from God’s benevolence. One prominent example of this was their affinity towards theatre acts which depicted scenes of enjoying things irrelevant to how one should love God. Although this struck Augustine as quite odd, he nonetheless enjoyed these theatrical acts, often positively remarking about scenes of immense sadness and depression. He came to question whether or not pity, as shared by the citizens of Carthage, was meant as an indication to what his life should represent.

As this man was inspired to learn the truth, he read a book called Hortensius and soon after joined the Manicheans. These people had elements of Christianity and elements of Buddhism but believed that all creations including flesh were evil. They believed all sex; even marriage including the birth of children was evil and sinful. Manicheans felt that the world was evil material full of darkness trying to find the spiritual world of light, as some would say, the power between good and evil. While being associated with the Manicheans, Augustine had the conception that evil was capable of being touched, like a material substance. But as he spoke with others and further looked into what evil means to exist, he abandoned the notion that evil is something tangible. He realized that evil does not exist in the physical world and therefore moved away from the Manichean religion.

Saint Augustine of Hippos was born November 13, 354, in Thagaste, which is part of present day Algeria. Born to a pagan father (who converted to Christianity on his deathbed) and a very devout Christian mother, St. Monica, he was torn between beliefs. He was schooled in Latin literature, and eventually went to Carthage to study rhetoric. During this time, he married and lived with a woman (her name is unknown) who gave birth to Augustine’s son. By the time he was twenty, he had turned away from Christianity, and went in other directions. For nearly a decade, he found refuge in Manichaeism, a Persian dualistic philosophy that was very popular at the time. With its main principle concerning the battle between pure good and evil, it appealed to

The first major milestone of St. Augustine’s conversion to the Christian faith was his realization during his adolescent years that his behavior was pointlessly reckless and rebellious and far from God’s design for his life. Born to St. Monica, St. Augustine was raised in a faith filled home. He was integrated into the church from a young age and was raised in Christian institutions during his

One of the religions that Augustine primarily devoted himself to before his conversion was Manichaeism. Augustine was attracted to the teachings and values of Manichaeism because of the way they explained evil, saying there are two gods: one good and one evil. Throughout Augustine’s youth, Catholic teachings did not further answer his questions regarding the issue, as described when Augustine states: “Above all, I heard first one, then another, then many difficult passages in the Old Testament scriptures figuratively interpreted, where I, by

It is obvious from The Confession that Augustine was a man who struggled endlessly to extricate himself from the bondage of sin, but the more he tried, the more he failed and sinks deeper into its abyss. And with every failure, comes a sense of disappointment and despondency, until he had a strange experience. In AD 386, while sitting in his garden, Augustine heard a voice from some children playing not far away urging “him” to pick the book—the Bible, and read. What he read from Apostle Paul’s letter to the Roman Christian in Chapter 13 transformed, not only his understanding of the hopelessness and despair man encounters in trying to solve the problem of sin on his own, but he saw the provision that God has made to remedy the consequences of sin and the grace he has graciously provided to live a life that is acceptable to God. That moment was the turning point in Augustine’s life and how he developed his sotoriological

He was profoundly influenced by the philosophical treatise Horentsius, written by the Roman statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero. When questioning his parents’ religion, he was particularly drawn to Manichaeism, also known as the Manichees. Manichaeism is a dualistic philosophical religion based on a God of Good and a God of Evil. This religion, at first, seemed to correspond to most of the plausible hypothesis’s Saint Augustine created to conclude a philosophical and ethical system. The Manichees claimed to have found contradictions in Holy Writ, also known as the Bible. He was so astonished by this he couldn’t help but dedicate his time and study’s to the book of the Manichees. The Manichees believed that there was contradiction in the scriptures of the Bible. They did not believe that the earth and the human race were created as it was written in Genesis. But when Saint Augustine questioned the Manichees concerning the movements of the stars, none of them could answer him. Disappointed, Saint Augustine turned skeptic about the religion and so he left the Manichees.

St. Augustine was born in the fourth century, (354 A.D. to be exact) . Augustine was born to a Christian mother and to a pagan father. Although Augustine struggled throughout his life he finally converted to Christianity and began his journey as a theological philosopher whom was one of the biggest influences on western Christianity. Augustine spent much of his life continuously learning and teaching new things even after he became a Priest and later Bishop. Augustine as you may already know is very famous

This duelist sect believed in the Devine God who was the embodiment of everything good and an equal evil power. They also believed that the flesh was inherently evil. In the next few years after settling his beliefs with Manechaeism and realizing its faults, Augustine would fall into believing in several other non-Christian movements (Brown 31). After being encouraged to do so by many of his friends, he read many of the writings of the Greek philosophers known as neoplatonists. Along with the sermons of Saint Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, these writings convinced Augustine to contemplate his return to the Christian faith. Eventually he overcame his numerous encounters with heresy, and was baptized into the Catholic Church in the year 387 (Brown 43).

Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, was one of the greatest philosophers of the roman period. He was raised in a religiously divided home, but through time he found his own truth. He was always an excellent student. He fully mastered the Latin language, however, he never did well with Greek. Saint Augustine was also a man who had a way with words. After his teenage rebellious stage, he found an unorthodox religious group that he decided to become involved with for a while. He traveled the area and ended up staying in Milan for a while. This is where he met Bishop Ambrose and began to listen to his teachings. This caused for Augustine think about his life and ultimately converted him to Christianity. After converting, he wrote books such as: Confessions, The City of God, and De Doctrinia (On Christian Doctrine), along with many others. Saint Augustine was and still is a great Christian influence in the world today.